CMU Portugal Program Startup Sentilant Takes Its First Steps
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Sentilant, a spinoff from the Universidade de Coimbra, created in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, was co-founded in May 2013 by Bruno Cabral and Jorge Granjal, faculty members of the Universidade de Coimbra. The company is currently headquartered at Instituto Pedro Nunes, in Coimbra. Bruno Cabral, who has had a deep involvement with the Program, in particular as co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of the research project Æminium – Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality, feels that “the know-how and technology developed with Æminium were essential to plan, design and develop Sentilant’s infrastructure.” |
The learning, inspiration and networking opportunities provided by the CMU Portugal Program were the most beneficial factors for Bruno Cabral while he was creating Sentilant. He was also a faculty member in the joint Professional Masters Program in Software Engineering (MSE) between CMU and the Universidade de Coimbra, and a participant in the Faculty Exchange Program. “Throughout the Program, I have had the opportunity to observe, interact and be inspired by the many entrepreneurial initiatives that were being created by the people participating in the Program,” says Bruno Cabral, adding that “networking with the other startups of the Program, and sharing their experience, made this process much simpler.”
| The Æminium project aimed at improving the state-of-art in concurrent programming, making it simpler, safer and more efficient. One of the project’s outcomes was EVE, a new event-oriented programming language that “offers implicit parallelization on the event-loop, making it an ideal programming language for developing web-based systems, such as Sentilant’s multi-tenant framework,” explained Bruno Cabral. “The know-how and technology developed with Æminium was essential to plan, design and develop Sentilant’s infrastructure,” he added. |
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Sentilant provides services and software products that allow people and organizations to collect, analyze and share business and real-time sentient data from, and on, their mobile devices. The market will see the first version of their product next year. So far, Sentilant has won two technological innovation awards with a product that uses sensorial data collected from smartphones to help users improve driving efficiency: the Inov C Award (first place) of the Competition “Arrisca.C’2012 – Ideas, Business Plans, and Proofs of Concept”, and the second place in the PT Galp Innovation Challenge.
For the near future, the founders plan to make the first version of their product available in mobile app stores during the first quarter of 2014. Afterwards, Bruno Cabral and Jorge Granjal plan to deploy the first customized version for organizational clients. Also next year, Sentilant will “start establishing its client base and develop a stable version of the company’s development and production framework,” revealed Bruno Cabral.
December 2013
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The Æminium project aimed at improving the state-of-art in concurrent programming, making it simpler, safer and more efficient. It was carried out between 2009 and 2012 in the scope of the CMU Portugal Program, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. The project’s main goal was to develop a framework and programming language that offer developers and users a new paradigm where concurrency is the default, which is contrary to the common practice where sequential execution is the standard. The Principal Investigators of this project were Bruno Cabral, from the Universidad de Coimbra, and Jonathan Aldrich, from Carnegie Mellon University.
